Rethink is Required for Promotion Play-offs that Reward Mediocrity

How do you upset 38,000 Blackpool fans? That's easy. By donning the tin hat and flak jacket, and adopting the role of the killjoy party-pooper who looks beyond the inevitable hoopla and hullabaloo of their victory over Cardiff City.

To be the one who has the temerity to suggest the play-offs, which in less than a quarter of a century have become part of the fabric of English football, are nothing more than a flawed mechanism to reward mediocrity, celebrate the run of the mill and give the average Joe a falsely inflated sense of self-worth.

There remains something intrinsically nonsensical that after deciding the natural order of things via a gruelling nine-month, 46-game season we then to have a third of the promotion places decided by as little as four-and-a-half hours' football.